‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said to the muscular, adrenalin-fuelled skinheads. Coming from most people, such a statement would have sounded overambitious.
Not so coming from Gunnar Nyberg.
He took a step forward.
‘Come on, help an old man out. I’m Swedish fourteen generations back. My forefathers ate raw eel together with Erik XI. Are any of you Reine Sandberg?’
The three skinheads still standing glanced at one another. They put down their baseball bats and the biggest of them said: ‘I am. What d’you want?’
‘Were you kicking over Jewish gravestones in Södra Begravningsplatsen yesterday evening?’
Reine Sandberg grabbed his baseball bat and aimed a fierce blow at Gunnar Nyberg. With a sigh, Nyberg grabbed him. He moved round behind Sandberg and twisted the piece of wood from his hand. Then he pushed him down to the ground so that he was sitting with the baseball bat between his legs, and shoved him over to the concrete wall. He lifted the bat like a lever. Reine Sandberg bellowed.
‘Give us a minute, will you?’ Nyberg said to the two remaining skinheads.
They did. Quickly.
‘I’ve tried being nice,’ Gunnar Nyberg said, lifting the bat slightly higher. ‘Let’s try again. Andreas Rasmusson is your friend, correct?’
‘Yeah,’ said Reine Sandberg.
‘Great. The two of you were out drinking and breaking gravestones in the Jewish cemetery last night, correct?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good. What exactly did you see that put Andreas Rasmusson – eighteen years old – in critical care in the psych ward, while you, Reine Sandberg – twenty-six years old – are swinging a baseball bat at a policeman as though nothing had happened?’
‘Fuck all,’ Sandberg groaned. ‘It was dark.’
‘Are you sure you want to do it like this? I don’t.’
And with that, Gunnar Nyberg raised the baseball bat slightly higher once more. He could feel it crunching strangely against one of Sandberg’s testicles.
‘OK, OK, OK, take that off and I’ll tell you. Take it away!’
Given that his voice had gone up an octave or so, it was probably time. Nyberg pulled the bat away from the skinhead’s genitals. Sandberg sank down with his hands to his crotch.
‘So,’ said Nyberg. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘It was fucking horrible. They came gliding out of the shadows, these thin, dark figures. Like they were coming right out of the trees or something. All in black with, like, tights covering their bodies and black hoods on, like executioners. They hung that guy up in the tree. Upside down. That’s when we ran off. We fucking ran. We lost Andreas somewhere. He must’ve been running around the cemetery, totally lost. After seeing that, ’course he flipped.’
‘How many of them were there?’
‘Dunno. It felt like they were everywhere. Just gliding. A… presence.’
‘A presence?’
‘I don’t know how to describe it. Yeah, for fuck’s sake, a presence. At least five of them anyway, I think.’
‘What do you mean by thin?’
‘The opposite of you, you pig.’
Gunnar Nyberg looked down at his newly slimmed body with slight surprise. Could he really still be described as fat?
‘So they were little? Little people?’
‘No, not really. I don’t know. Thin. Light. Like they’d just detached from the trees. Strips of bark.’
‘Strips of bark?’
‘Don’t just repeat what I’ve just said. For fuck’s sake, we ran off as fast as we could. We thought they’d come after us, like mythological beings or whatever.’
‘Mythological beings?’
‘You’re doing it again,’ Reine Sandberg said, annoyed.
Gunner Nyberg was thinking. Mythological beings? Wasn’t there someone he should contact about this – in the absence of Arto? Yes, there was.
‘I’ve got to make a call,’ said Nyberg. ‘Then I’m going to arrest you and take you down to the station for vandalising Jewish gravestones. You’re not going to get away with that. Your testimony might just count as an extenuating circumstance, what do I know?’
And so Gunnar Nyberg made a call.
‘Paul Hjelm’ came the answer at the other end.
‘Paul, it’s Gunnar.’
‘Hey, Gunnar. You busy bothering skinheads?’
‘You could say that. I’ve just been talking to one who said they saw some kind of “gliding presence” among the gravestones. At least five thin figures dressed in black, he called them “mythological beings”. Thought it might be something for you, my old bookworm.’
‘Don’t say anything like that to your “date” tonight.’
‘It’s not a “date”. And how do you know about it, anyway?’
‘The whole station knows. We’ll be sitting at the table next to you with tape recorders.’
Gunnar Nyberg cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up. Then he phoned Sara Svenhagen back. She had been waiting long enough.
‘One call, you said,’ Reine Sandberg shouted from behind him.
Paul Hjelm was in his office at the police station, increasingly convinced that he had haemorrhoids. It seemed like all he did was sit these days.
The tones of Miles Davis were streaming uninterruptedly across the room. It had become more a fixation than a pleasure by this point. A need.
He spent a moment looking down at his mobile phone, as though it had been producing entirely unfamiliar sound waves. Something was starting to come together. The edges of a wound slowly growing closer.
He had spent the day going through the list of calls to and from the four rooms in the Norrboda Motell. After several hours’ fruitless work, it had clicked. A phone number appeared, demanding his attention.
From Monday 24 April onwards, calls had been made to all four phones from a room in Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel, room 305. The calls had been made at three-minute intervals around half four in the afternoon; in other words, this had taken place a week or so before Nikos Voultsos had died and the women had disappeared. A few days later, on Saturday 29 April, the women had also been contacted by the ninja feminist from Odenplan.
Grand Hôtel. If you were going to do something, you might as well do it properly. He phoned the hotel and spoke to a receptionist.
‘Can you tell me who was staying in room 305 from the twenty-fourth of April?’
The porter was silent. Then he said: ‘Aha.’
‘Aha?’
‘Apparently he disappeared. I don’t actually remember him myself, but he signed in as Marcel Dumas, French citizen.’
‘Disappeared? What does that mean?’
‘Sometimes guests leave the hotel without informing us. That’s why we always take their credit card number, as a precaution.’
‘Instead of their passport?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So you don’t have his passport?’
‘No, but we’ve got his Visa card number.’
‘So guests can disappear without any report being made to the police, because you can just take the payment from their card number?’
‘That’s right. The police are overburdened enough as it is.’
‘True,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘But that means you’re taking the law into your own hands. What if something had happened to him? Imagine he’d been, I don’t know, eaten by wolverines?’
The porter was silent. Hjelm continued.
‘When did this happen?’
‘The fifth of May. He arrived on Sunday the twenty-third of April. We got suspicious on the evening of Thursday the fourth – we hadn’t seen him for twenty-four hours. So when he didn’t show up for a second night in a row, we emptied the room and charged the bill to his account. Twelve nights. The bill came to sixty-three thousand kronor.’
‘Sixty-three thousand?!’
‘Yes.’
‘Now I can understand why you didn’t report it.’